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Consider the universe: we are agreed that its existence and
its nature come to it from beyond itself; are we, now, to imagine
that its maker first thought it out in detail- the earth, and its
necessary situation in the middle; water and, again, its position
as lying upon the earth; all the other elements and objects up to
the sky in due place and order; living beings with their
appropriate forms as we know them, their inner organs and their
outer limbs- and that having thus appointed every item
beforehand, he then set about the execution?
Such designing was not even possible; how could the plan for a
universe come to one that had never looked outward? Nor could he
work on material gathered from elsewhere as our craftsmen do,
using hands and tools; feet and hands are of the later order.
One way, only, remains: all things must exist in something else;
of that prior- since there is no obstacle, all being continuous
within the realm of reality- there has suddenly appeared a sign,
an image, whether given forth directly or through the ministry of
soul or of some phase of soul, matters nothing for the moment:
thus the entire aggregate of existence springs from the divine
world, in greater beauty There because There unmingled but
mingled here.
From the beginning to end all is gripped by the Forms of the
Intellectual Realm: Matter itself is held by the Ideas of the
elements and to these Ideas are added other Ideas and others
again, so that it is hard to work down to crude Matter beneath
all that sheathing of Idea. Indeed since Matter itself is in its
degree, an Idea- the lowest- all this universe is Idea and there
is nothing that is not Idea as the archetype was. And all is made
silently, since nothing had part in the making but Being and Idea
further reason why creation went without toil. The Exemplar was
the Idea of an All, and so an All must come into being.
Thus nothing stood in the way of the Idea, and even now it
dominates, despite all the clash of things: the creation is not
hindered on its way even now; it stands firm in virtue of being
All. To me, moreover, it seems that if we ourselves were
archetypes, Ideas, veritable Being, and the Idea with which we
construct here were our veritable Essence, then our creative
power too would toillessly effect its purpose: as man now stands,
he does not produce in his work a true image of himself: become
man, he has ceased to be the All: ceasing to be man- we read- "he
soars aloft and administers the Kosmos entire"; restored to the
All he is maker of the All.
But- to our immediate purpose- it is possible to give a reason
why the earth is set in the midst and why it is round and why the
ecliptic runs precisely as it does, but, looking to the creating
principle, we cannot say that because this was the way therefore
things were so planned: we can say only that because the All is
what it is, therefore there is a total of good; the causing
principle, we might put it, reached the conclusion before all
formal reasoning and not from any premises, not by sequence or
plan but before either, since all of that order is later, all
reason, demonstration, persuasion.
Since there is a Source, all the created must spring from it and
in accordance with it; and we are rightly told not to go seeking
the causes impelling a Source to produce, especially when this is
the perfectly sufficient Source and identical with the Term: a
Source which is Source and Term must be the All-Unity, complete
in itself.
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